Hello again everyone! Time for another announcement.
###Implementation News
It has been a few weeks since Sponge’s API v1.0 was released and in that time, a lot of work has been done to implement said API. If you haven’t been paying attention, there have been ~23 commits to the Sponge implementation and ~31 commits to the API since the start of the month. To put that into scale, here is a graph of the additions and deletions for Sponge. Notice the huge uptick in work in the last week or two:
Much of this work can be attributed to @blood and several others helping him get his work done by fixing issues in the API. Aside from entities and initial support for player chat, everything is still a work in progress. You can send players messages now. But we have a LOT of work to do!
###We need developers!
From the start, we have tried several different approaches to bring new people into our ranks. Most of them have been huge failures. It’s hard to gauge how much interest a developer will have for a project in the long term for something like what Sponge was in the beginning. It was so full of hype and everyone wanted a piece of it. Some people didn’t stick around. However, the largest problem was that there were hundreds of people who wanted to be apart of the project and never got a chance.
Why is that? We told people to fill out an application and they would be selected from a list and later interviewed for a position if one was available. This turned out to be a monumental task. It took a lot of time to first go through the large number of applicants and then try to pick out the best people. After that was done, we contacted those people to see who was still interested. Those people were then put in a separate list that could be drawn from by the development team and many weren’t properly contacted.
Let’s try a new approach. If you want to work on Sponge, just work on it. Start submitting PR’s for things that need to be done. If your work is really good, and if you submit enough to show that you are dedicated, you may be pulled into the core team. Let your work act as your application that proves your skill. This way, we won’t leave a giant list of people waiting and if you aren’t skilled enough to work on Sponge, you will know right away when your PR’s aren’t accepted.
###Documentation
We have been trying to get the Sponge docs off the ground for some time now. It’s actually available for consumption as we speak, though the specific address hasn’t been revealed. We wanted to make sure everything was taken care of first, making docs accurate and ensuring that we had all of the pages we wanted in place. We could use more help doing some of this work. Just like above, if you want to help with docs, start making PR’s on the docs github repo. If your information is valid and accurate, it will get accepted.
Please give us plenty of feedback and let us know what you, the community, want us to do. This will help us grow and prosper together. Thanks!
####EDIT
So, this wasn’t included in the initial announcement, but internally we are working on getting lists of things that need to be done so people aren’t just working blindly. @gratimax thought this would be a good way to work up a list, setting up specific Github issues labeled “Help Wanted” and you can search for those specifically to know what you can work on. Here is the current help wanted list.
. But its a motivation to start trying to help again.
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